[Ortus forms a wordless murmur against her corpse-frigid skull. She is too large to rock in his arms, but there is something of the motion echoed in the manner in which he braces against her struggling. He shrugs off her blows. He barely feels them at all.]

He will not.

[Ortus is the last bard of the Ninth. He knows how to wield his voice as a hammer or a knife, how to flood it with depths of contempt that other Houses should shudder to contemplate.

He makes it a woollen blanket, warm and heavy. He settles it around her shoulders and tucks in the corners.]

You know he will not. It is not in his nature. He could not be the man he is, to have done all that he did, if he were capable of knowing his error.

[He knows from long experience how dry the wells of a cruel man's heart run.]

All he can give you is what he knows how to give, and relief is not one of them.

[He pets her hair like she is a child again, the child she never was given the chance to be.]

Your happiness was never his to give. It was a thing he could only seek to take.